Sure, there are people for whom this is their job, and they get up and do it on an 8 AM - 5 PM basis. I get that. But for me, my writing goes in fits and starts, highly dependent upon whether the bug actually bites me and I can write in an inspired state. When I try to force myself to write, what tends to come out sounds like reports from work.
That might be because report and documentation writing is the least favorite part of my job.
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| The beauty of working from home is that I can be flipping off Lumbergh while he's telling me this. From makeameme.org. |
It's not that I don't realize that the work is important --because it is-- it's just that writing that stuff is bland and uninteresting. It's... well, it's a job, and being forced to write is not nearly as fun as wanting to write something.
So when I see people like Brandon or Stephen King do the 8 hours of "work" of writing per day, somewhere deep inside my brain I hear screaming, as if my creative impulse was bound up and tossed over the walls of the Chateau d'If.
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I will freely admit that I do have issues with description. There are days when I sit there and see something in my head and think "this would be so much easier if I had the capability to actually draw or paint what I see rather than describe it," but my artistic ability is worse than my writing.
"What does it look like?" I tell myself.
"Nice," I reply.
"Nice... That fucking helps a lot..."
I'm reminded of how the Apollo astronauts were trained to observe and describe objects on the lunar surface. They all had to learn how to describe landscapes the same way that they described activity in the spacecraft they flew, and it took a large amount of unlearning to then begin to build up their vocabulary and phrasing properly.
While I'm not on the caliber of being an Apollo astronaut, surely I can figure out how to write the turns of phrase needed to describe something properly.
Ha.
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| From colorado.edu. |
I wish it were that easy.
My inner critic loves to tell me that I'm no good and that I should give up "playing at writing", but I've found that my addiction to putting words on the (virtual) page isn't so easily vanquished. I don't believe that my speed at writing fiction will ever improve, but hopefully I can actually complete a story without it turning into drudgery.
Well, in the case of Stephen King, he says he literally - not metaphorically - addicted to writing. He used to be addicted to alcohol and cocaine and without writing he says "''Oh, I'd be dead. I would have drunk myself to death or drugged myself to death or committed suicide or some goddamn thing.''
ReplyDeleteThere's a long interview from 2000 where he talks about it but I've seen numerous quotes from him to the same effect. I imagine many extremely prolific writers are channeling what would otherwise be a damaging addiction into a more productive channel. Probably better to be glad not to have that kind of drive than to envy it.
I remember King going over his addictions in his book On Writing, so I suppose it would make sense that he'd transfer the focus of his addictions to writing itself.
DeleteWhat bugs me is that I know I have a similar addictive personality, but for some reason it's never centered on writing as what I am addicted to. Probably that's due to my struggles with descriptive writing, but I don't know for sure. If there's one thing that I do know, however, is that report writing is devoid of anything resembling descriptive writing, as embellishments in all forms are frowned upon when statements of fact are prized.